Screencast videos are great in online courses! Basically, these media are a video of what you see on your computer screen and your voice as you explore it. The screencast may be a PowerPoint presentation, website, Blackboard, map, whatever.

Jing provides free account to record 5-minute (MAX!) screencast videos . (If you are more serious, you may consider a paid Camtasia account).

The video below is a Jing screencast video I recently used to welcome my online undergraduate students to class on the first day.

Once I “shot” and recorded the Jing video, I transferred the video to another related account at Screencast. Screencast is like Youtube or Vimeo; it’s a service for storing and sharing videos. In the past, I’ve used Youtube and Vimeo. I like screencast because the privacy settings are great – I could make a folder PRIVATE, yet share the link of a video in the folder. And Screencast is linked to Jing so the transfer/upload is really fast and simple too. (Vimeo has additional benefits for storing videos – i.e. screencasts or narrated PowerPoints – because there are additional privacy settings that allow you to remove the option for viewers to embed the video randomly online. This provides additional control over where your lectures, videos, etc end up on the web.)

There are numerous videos on the web regarding the use of Jing. If you search on “How to use Jing” in Google, and then look for videos, you will see several. Feel free to take a look at any of these you would like.